Ethnic mongol herders in north china have traditionally enjoyed a distinctive cultural landscape. In contrast to the way dense population and intensive agriculture strictly regimented land-use practices among Han Chinese, dispersed settlement and mobile stock-herding permitted Mongol society to operate and evolve under much different spatial and ecological horizons. Such deep-rooted orientations still resist facile alignment with alien standards now imposed by Beijing, disguised as they are in the language of economic development.

The rural credit system in traditional agrarian societies has long been associated with “usury,” and therefore often considered a hindrance to rural development. Three aspects of the traditional rural credit system are used to substantiate this assertion. First, traditional rural credit often entailed interest rates above the ceiling set by law. As early as 1790 b.c., the Laws of Hammurabi established annual interest ceilings of 33.3 percent for grain loans and 20 percent for cash loans. Any loan charging interest beyond the ceiling was illegal (Sowards 1983, 5). To many contemporary scholars, even a ceiling of 20 to 30 percent seems exorbitant: given the low return of traditional farming, peasants could hardly afford to borrow at such high interest rates. Second, from a socioeconomic perspective, high interest rates suggest unequal relations between debtors and creditors. According to Rao, the origin of this unequal relationship lies in market imperfection, or so-called “connectedness”—the link between wealth inequality and the failure-of-markets mechanism (1986). A fragmented and noncompetitive market, this view maintains, facilitates personalized credit transactions which not only extract surplus but also perpetuate peasants' credit dependency on the landlord. This credit dependency, in turn, creates a situation in which compulsive indebtedness gradually deprives the peasantry of the means of production (Bhaduri 1983, chaps. 4, 5). Finally, it is asserted, traditional rural credit had little to do with production. Most peasants used rural credit for consumption purposes, which had destructive effects on agricultural production. Rural credit, in these views, is a siphon that draws resources out of the rural sector, locks peasants into a vicious cycle of debt, creates rural inequality, and hinders production. Scholars who have studied the Chinese peasant economy agree, by and large, that that was the nature of Chinese rural credit system.

Although in recent years newspapers and journals have been full of reports about family politics in the Philippines, the growing economic might of President Suharto's children and the business holdings of the Thai royal family, the “family” has only recently emerged as a subject of serious study in the historiography of Southeast Asia (McCoy 1993 and Andaya 1992 and 1994). Barbara Andaya's study of Southeast Sumatra in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the first sustained examination of the significance of kinship for understanding political and economic relations in the history of any part of Southeast Asia (Andaya 1993). One of the most important reasons for the neglect of the family as a major historical topic, to extend the argument made by Craig Reynolds in a recent critique of writing on modern Thai history, is that historians of Southeast Asia generally have tended to focus less on gender or power relations in the region, and more on questions of male “power” and historical “structures” (Reynolds 1994).

In 1924 a half-Taiwanese, half-Japanese man travelled from Japan to Shanghai to study French at the Jesuit Université L'Aurore. He was young, flamboyant, and rich, and eventually used his own personal funds to found two bookstores and three journals in Shanghai. Despite his ambiguous national identity and lack of formal Chinese education, he also became the founder of a Chinese modernist literary movement called new sensationism (xinganjue pai), earned substantial notoriety, and attracted a host of followers. Murdered by an unidentified assassin in 1939, in his shorr life Liu Na'ou (1900–39) mirrored the literary movement that he created and that died with him. But this was not before he had published an intriguing collection of short stories entitled Scène (his own French title, 1930a), which was in some measure to define what urban writing meant for Chinese writers in Shanghai during the Nanjing decade (1927–37), as the quotation above suggests.